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Search Engine.
A search engine is a program that automatically captures content on the internet, stores it in an index and, in response to a search query, returns the most suitable results in ranked order. The best known is Google; others include Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and, increasingly, AI search engines such as Perplexity, which deliver answers instead of lists of results.
Search Engine — Explained in Detail
Every web search engine works in three steps. During crawling, automated programs known as crawlers or bots search the web by following links from page to page. During indexing, the content of each page found is analysed and stored in a huge database. During ranking, in response to a query, the search engine selects the suitable pages from the index and orders them by relevance and quality.
Google clearly dominates web search in Switzerland; Bing follows at a distance and is also important as a data source, because other services draw on its index, such as DuckDuckGo and Ecosia in part, as well as Microsoft Copilot. There are also search engines with a particular focus, such as privacy (Startpage, Qwant), or specialist searches within platforms such as YouTube, Amazon or Google Maps.
Since 2023, search has been changing fundamentally. Google adds AI Overviews to many results pages and offers conversational search with AI Mode. AI search engines such as Perplexity or search in ChatGPT deliver directly formulated answers with sources. For websites this means that alongside the position in a list of results, it becomes important whether their content is used as the source of an answer.
For companies, the basic principle remains the same: a website must be reachable for crawlers, clear in its content and trustworthy. That is the task of search engine optimisation and, for AI systems, of GEO.
Organic results and ads
A search engine's results page, the SERP, consists of several parts: paid ads (labelled 'Sponsored' on Google), organic results that cannot be bought, and special elements such as the local pack, images, videos, question boxes or AI summaries. Which elements appear depends on the query.
Organic visibility comes from SEO, paid visibility from search engine advertising. The two complement each other: ads bring immediate visibility for selected terms, while organic positions work long-term without click costs.
Example: how a bakery in Lucerne is found
Someone searches on their smartphone for 'bakery Lucerne open Sunday'. Google first shows a local pack with three bakeries and opening hours from the Google Business Profile, followed by organic results from directories and bakery websites. If the same person asks ChatGPT, they get a short list with reasons, based on websites, reviews and map data.
A bakery with correct opening hours in its profile, clear information on its website and good reviews has the best chance in both cases. How we implement this locally is shown on the page Local SEO; whether your own website is readable for AI systems is checked by the AI visibility check.
Related Page
SEO – Search Engine OptimisationFrequently Asked Questions About Search Engine
Google by a wide margin, followed by Bing. Bing is also relevant because other services such as DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Microsoft Copilot partly draw on its index. AI search engines such as Perplexity and search in ChatGPT are growing.
Search engines find websites via links from other pages. It is quicker if you register your website in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and submit an XML sitemap.
ChatGPT is primarily a language model, but it has a search function that retrieves current web pages and answers with sources. In this mode it works much like an AI search engine.
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